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Whoops, it’s Sunday! Well, it feels like a Caturday. Either way, I hope you’re getting a good chance to catch up on your beauty sleep.

It’s almost my naptime, but first I thought you’d like to know a little bit more about the Ultimate Hazel, now available on Etsy!

So…What’s in the Ultimate Hazel?

Let me tell you how I got the idea, and why I decided to make them.

After being born in 2014, I started my blog and Facebook page and did a bunch of intermews, which led me to meeting Lynda Barry! She’s a masterful cartoonist and superstar professor at UW-Madison, and getting to meow questions at her has been one of my greatest honors. You can read our excellent chat here.

We hit it off over some catnip tea and tuna cookies, and over the holidays, she helped me finish my first-ever story, Flaky the Snow Cat! I got the idea after seeing Frosty the Snowman and wondering if there were snow cats.

Flaky the Snow Cat tells the story of Nugget, a lonely black cat who runs away from home to ask Santa for a friend. I was struggling to get the words on paper, since English is my second language (after Cat), so Professor Barry taught me to tell the story with pictures.

The final product includes over 127 images in four separate zines (zines = handmade comic books). You can get the entire Flaky the Snow Cat in your Ultimate Hazel!

Last spring, I took her Advanced Comics class, where I made Hydrated Tourist Penguin Goes to Paris! (which was purrblished by a local newspaper!) and “Fluffy:” The Cat Who’s Clearly a Snake and No One Notices, both also included in the Ultimate Hazel!

In March, I was invited to share my work at a local writing conference. When I told my furriend Mary about it, she wrote me a check to help cover the cost of printing. I couldn’t stop purring! For the first time, I felt like a Professional Writer Kitty! To thank her, I printed off every presentable story I had written.

It made for a nice little gift bag! I started printing more of my work and selling them at more conferences throughout the year.

Since it’s the holiday season once again, it feels like a good time to share Flaky the Snow Cat and the Ultimate Hazel (sounds like a band name!) with you, my beloved, kitty-loving furriends.

Flaky the Snow Cat is pretty expensive to print in color, so that is why it costs $20. I just use my own printer, and color ink is so ‘spensive!! If you do happen to know of a cheaper way to print in color, let me know and I will send you an Ultimate Hazel for free! All of the professional printing services in my area ask for around 60 cents per page, which means I would have to charge almost 30 bucks JUST for Flaky the Snow Cat, and that’s just too much.

The Ultimate Hazel represents both a look back towards all the great work I learned how to make in 2015 while raising funds to produce more and even better work in 2016. Any proceeds that do not cover printing will help cover the cost of art supplies, table fees for conferences, and catnip and kitty snacks!

You can also make a donation through PayPal now!

Thank you for supporting my kitty art and keeping me well-snacked! They make me feel better after the vacuum.

However, if you’d like to read some Hazel Comics, but aren’t sure if you can afford the printed versions, just send me an e-mail at hazelfluffypants@gmail.com and I’d be happy to send you a digital version for free.